Paralegals and Legal Executives becoming increasingly important in private practice within the Yorkshire market

The outlook for the non-qualified legal recruitment market has never looked better in the Yorkshire area.

Paralegals and legal executives working in private practice law firms are a large and growing constituent of the professional staff in law firms in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and surrounds.

As well as those legal professionals who come through the traditional ILEX route there now exists an abundance of LPC graduates of an exceptionally high caliber, emerging each year from the city’s highly rated law schools: the University of Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan University and BPP Law School.

Relatively recently, this valuable commodity to the Leeds legal market would have exported itself to the more traditional legal centre of the City of London, however, now they are finding comparable and indeed in many cases more appealing opportunities right here in Yorkshire.

LPC graduates are entering the market with the requisite knowledge and are able to secure opportunities that will give them that edge in terms of the skills and experience necessary to attain that illusive training contract and so the legal recruitment cycle continues and inevitably the market will continue to grow from strength to strength.
Law firms large and small are becoming acutely aware of the potential benefits to be reaped from the non-qualified legal market and as such paralegals and legal executives have been entrusted with a far greater role in legal work covering many core legal disciplines.

Increasingly, recourse to non-qualified fee earners in being considered a valid legal recruitment option by the law firms in Yorkshire.

The lack of necessity to pay for continuing professional development for non qualified solicitors and the ever increasing cost of practising certificate fees mean that non qualified fee earners with strong client skills, legal knowledge and ability to ‘hit the ground running’ with an existing caseload become ever more valuable.

Claire Watt of BCL Legal specialises in recruiting non-qualified and legal executive fee earners into law firms across all disciplines in Yorkshire. If you would like information in relation to employment within Private Practice, Claire is well poised to help you. Please contact her on 0845 241 0933.